It’s up to me to make the souls of my parishioners live, to make them happy and dream that they are immortal, not to kill them. (Miguel de Unamuno, San Manuel Bueno, Martir

I had not heard of Michel Onfray before France became troubled by the Yellow Vest movement. He is reputedly the foremost intellectual of France; that is, outside of its center in Paris, where jealous critics scorn him for the popularity of his enormous production, referring to the university professor as a high school philosopher, which he actually was for many years in Caen before he founded his own anti-Platonic Academy.

First of all, Monsieur Onfray is reputedly an intellectual giant as opposed to a mean member of the intelligentsia. That is, he is an independent, unruly thinker. No, genuine intellectuals would not prostitute their very souls in institutional brothels, or so they might think until the devil offers them great jobs. And they shall read lots of books because they know that, as Onfray says, “words kill,” and they would like to do some killing themselves. That is why we find them whispering into the ears of kings, emperors, dictators, and presidents so that their will may be done as it is in heaven by the immortal god of death at the risk of becoming intelligent lackeys.

Eric Hoffer, an intellectual longshoreman and social critic, pointed out in The Ordeal of Change (1963) that intellectuals have been traditionally aligned with the powers-that-be; they seldom take up the interest of the masses unless they become frustrated or lose their status. Their love for the People is soon lost when irrational people get in the way of their rational plans. Where the exercise of power is concerned, they differ little from their former bosses: pharaohs, kings, presidents, generals, directors, executives, and so on. He observed that, although radical changes are pioneered by intellectuals, they in turn are eventually elbowed out by practical men because action takes precedence over words when something must be done. Nonetheless, men of words can win the battle for souls: “Only they can get around the roadblock which bars our way to the dispirited millions everywhere. There must be general awareness of the vital role the intellectuals have to play in our struggle for survival. And they must be given a limited share in the shaping and execution of policies which they will be called upon to expound and defend.” Enter the parade of poets, philosophers, writers, artists, scientists and professors to make the new policies “heard.”

Everyone scholiast knows that the philosopher’s Sisyphean task was inscribed on a temple at Delphi: Know Thyself. Onfray says to be a philosopher one must psychoanalyze one’s existential self (do not waste money on interminable Freudian analysis).

But one must know what his being is before puzzling his existence into pieces. That is impossible without the perception of someone else who reflects the self that one is besides one’s physical deeds, that is to say, his habit of thinking, the pattern of his symbolic action. Until then, the so-called ‘I’ or Category of One is an abstract universal, nothing but a myth, and a vain, empty one at that, making of every damned fool a god or colossal ego. Mind you that Onfray is careful to deny that his philosophy and self-spelunking psychology is egotistical.

Onfray’s perspective reminded me of Albert Camus, whose language is plainer, seemingly parched by the Algerian sun as if he were suffering from shellshock and inebriated incredulity. Nevertheless, I was not surprised to learn that both were cultivated in humble circumstances, both had suffered Catholicism, and that Onfray eventually wrote a book about Camus’ philosophy, a book that I have yet to obtain in English much to my disappointment because I want to know if Camus, who insisted he was not a so-called Existentialist, was more of a Gironde than a Jacobin, as some internationalists who claim to know the difference say. As far as I am concerned, the many interpretations of Camus’ works are far more pleasing to read than the works themselves. Yet what little I have read of Professor Onfray diverts me from boredom in its subtle attempts to evade the religious trappings of the prevailing death culture or structure of evil vainly designed to avoid evil by denying death. Google translations of his Romanic French into Germanic English preserves a tasty postmodern mélange that is often much ado about nothing in particular, or art for the sake of art conducted with greater ease than romantic Flaubert’s painstaking effort to be realistic in Leon while Colet was with other lovers in Paris.

Onfray’s wordiness would be tedious absent his rhetorical flourishes, his refreshing restatements of old platitudes, his neologisms, and his incisive if not caustic observations of a human nature that he ironically shares with the race and thus constitutes his self-portrait. There is apparently no such thing as writer’s block for him. Like Jean-Paul Sartre, he would not say exactly the same thing twice or quote his past work at great length, yet he still churns out hundreds if not thousands of words daily.

Indeed, he seems to be a “writing machine,” a label my own worst critic flattered me with after I commented at book length on the pictures she had posted on the Internet of herself and her girlfriend embracing nude under a running shower. On the other hand, my best critic, a public official and former activist journalist, flattered me by telling me I was qualified for subsidized “artist housing” because I was a “bullshit artist.” Of course that category of housing was promotional bullshit, and the darling artist featured by the local newspaper, a man who said he had trouble making ends meet, was graced by an inheritance and had an income of over $200,000 per year.

Onfray’s prolixity, in any case, is far greater than mine, perhaps because he has bigger ears than mine. I tried to listen twice as long as I speak after I learned I have two ears and one mouth. That may be a great waste of time because absolutely truth, unlike, for example, the relative voice and face of my fair lady, cannot be recognized if one does not already know it, and much of what we know of truth is premised on nonsense. Still, thinking and writing machines are machines. I opine that our machines fly from death in patterns describing structures of evil erected by society in its denials of death, wherefore Ernest Becker’s books should be made available at airline hubs so that we know where we are going faster than we think.

So independent intellectuals love the genuine wisdom of which the foolish crowd has very little despite a fool’s bestselling book to the contrary. We would be philosophers, and to that end plain language suffices better than fancy talk. Socrates said a philosopher lives to die, preparing for death instead of avoiding it, so that he may welcome it when it comes. The final cause of life is death, yet I am beginning to believe as I near the blankest wall that the purpose is in the interim, in the propagation of life as an end in itself. In other words, and no number of words shall do, the purpose of life is to take the most pleasure in life that can be had without hurting others, to perpetuate life on Earth instead of dwelling on The End that is really nothing. I believe Onfray agrees.

Monsieur Onfray perceives, perhaps with the “I told you so” pleasure of foreknowledge, what appears to be the application of a biblical structure of evil threatening France today, as if it were prophecy because history repeats itself. That awful machine, dubbed the Borg in science fiction, is the European Union, the proverbial leviathan that would twist the independent lives out of European nations. It has the poor souls of France in its stranglehold, and President Emmanuel Macron, whom he suggests is a brutal monster if not Satan himself, would be its great dragon king in the form of a bronze oven called Moloch, an oven idolized to preside over the sacrificial holocaust of untold millions of souls. Horror of horrors, for Cronus could do no worse with his children in time, devouring them en masse on suitable occasions.

Of course we might think there is no such thing as metaphysical entities in themselves, or gods for that matter, nor that there is there a universal god, the one-god expected to save chosen members of mankind; that is, the omnipotent hence masculine God religious atheists deny although they, as Camus noted, pray to Him in dire emergencies. Western culture is Judeo-Christian, nevertheless, so we forgive atheists for their references to God, who would not be good without Satan, the angel who loves him the most.

In fact, Onfray advises us in A Hedonist Manifesto – The Power to Exist, to take an inventory of what is left of the Judeo-Christian in our daily lives. He correctly says that it is an illusion that Christianity, a punitive religion of redemption through endless guilt and suffering, is waning. In fact he says its immorality has crowded our prisons and mental hospitals with inmates, filled the cemeteries with corpses, and has cursed humankind with Nazi death camps, Stalinist Gulags, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, terrorism, Western fascism, and Eastern communism. So let us do the virtually impossible: eschew the fictions and fables, the ethics of heroes and saints of false religions; let us adopt the true philosophy, an atheism that denies the Torah, New Testament, and Koran in favor of the revolutionary enlightenment of scientific reason. Let’s abandon the ethics of heroes and saints and follow the ethics of the superlative Western sage. Well said, Monsieur, yet you know why that will never happen, because man may be wise but happens to be an animal at heart.

The sage would no doubt be the author who, like Onfray, wisely follows in the footsteps of his atheistic, materialist, existentialist predecessors. The true philosopher must put individual existence before the “being” of essential social constructs, so that the individual is rendered responsible for knowing that it is a body with a thinking brain, and, furthermore, that what we call the “I” is neuronal.

Monsieur Onfray recently made much of President Emmanuel Macron’s statement that he, Macron, is the product of a brutish history, and we could do the same by elaborating at length on Onfray’s reference to the idealist notion that his philosophy is pig philosophy, but that would be rude. He describes his liberal project, apparently unable to rid himself entirely of Judeo-Christian philosophy because, after all, the first existentialists were Jews to whom the unknown deity was so unknown it was anathema to even pronounce the name.

Atheists, we are informed, would give bodily existence priority over destructive abstract universals:

“They refuse to turn pain and suffering into paths to knowledge and personal redemption. They propose pleasure, enjoyment, the common good, and gladly accepted contracts. They take control of their bodies and don’t hate them. They master their passions and impulses, desires and emotions, instead of brutally extirpating them. What is the aspiration of the Epicurean project? The pure pleasure of existing: a project that is always welcome.”

We may imagine therefore that we are mental fields with identities determined by various circumstances and the rather mystical power of self-determination called Will. Indeed, our sage declares that I have the power to fashion myself. My attempts to exercise that power have given me considerable pain, and I feel guilty for reclining instead. One trainer tells me, “No pain, no gain,” and the other says, “Don’t do it if it hurts.”

“What should we endeavor to produce?” Onfray asks, and answers, “An I, a Me, a radical Subjectivity, a singular identity, an individual reality, a proper person, a noteworthy style, a unique force, an impressive strength, a comet tracing an untraveled path, an energy making its way down a luminous passage though the chaos of the cosmos, a beautiful individuality, a temperament, a character. We don’t have to aspire to a masterpiece or aim for perfection—of the genius, the hero, or the saint; we should just reach out for an insight that will give us a sovereignty we did not previously know.”

Of course we should use the Reason of the Enlightenment as our guide to the happiness of the greatest number. Is that the Reason idolized in churches during the Revolution? That Reason is an Ideal, a Being, the very sort of nonsensical nothing that Onfray would evade for our own good, wherefore his argument is beheaded, first of all, by the Absurd. What we naturally love the most is power, and politics is the distribution of that power. Political reasoning justifies the beastly drives. The concept of Reason is a social construct; according to whose reasons or causes, and what school of reasoning should I act? Should I read books on logic after abandoning Christian Logos, and remake myself according to Onfray’s reasoning or President Macron’s reasoning?

The problem with reason is human nature. Reasoning is all too often the rationalization of the irrational urges of the beast within. We want to do something, so we do it in the name of reason, and say our conduct is logical. Logic exposes faults in the process, the story, but what is logical is not necessarily true to factual reality, so the effect we want from the cause does not follow. Scientific reason or ideology, the science of ideas, may be helpful in that regard, but politics, the distribution of the absolute power everyone would like to have alone in order to live forever without resistance, is ultimately destructive hence logically absurd.

No doubt Onfray believes that the ‘Reason’ of the Enlightenment, the Light of Reason, has served humankind well inasmuch as it has purportedly liberated the duly educated man from irrational superstitions and prejudices and autocrats. Conservatives may disagree, and some independent intellectuals believe our scientific ideology is idiotology, a philosophy that has replaced theology, that we are plagued by the same daemons within as always, given different names. Onfray may not escape the daemons however fervently he denies their existence, so he might as well refer to such mythical entities and Moloch, Satan, God and the like, and excuse himself by saying the names are merely metaphorical. He probably has perused Antonio Rosmini’s reasoning on this subject and appreciates his declarations that:

“It is clear that the essence of being cannot be known through any other knowledge but through itself. The essence of being, therefore, is knowable in and through itself, and is the means whereby we know all other things. It is, therefore, the Light of Reason. From this point of view we say that the idea of being is innate, and that it is the form of intelligence.” And. “Human reason has only one Form, which I call the Form of Truth. Ideology is the science of ideas. Ideas are illuminated in the Light of Reason. That reason is Being.” So methinks the Reason of the Enlightenment is really the Supreme Being when idealism is realism.

A man enlightened by reason is supposedly not a brute. President Macron, presently confronted by the Yellow Vests, a mass protest of workers wearing yellow traffic emergency vests, purportedly implied that he is a brute when he told the press on 13 February 2018 that he is the fruit of a brutal form of history, a literary faux pas our Gaulish philosophe, Monsieur Onfray, pointed out in a polemical brief entitled ‘The Brute,’ now being romantically hailed as one of the most eloquent tracts ever written in the French language. That is in addition to other remarkable pronouncements he has made casting the president as a Molochian monster. To be fair, President Macron, well educated by his fair lady, Brigitte, was probably referring to another great principle of the Enlightenment, namely Progress, and meant to say his enlightenment is historical, something every Marxist would understand.

Never mind. Onfray claims that Macron, a student of Machiavelli, does not seek to maintain order but to repress liberal reforms. Wherefore ‘Monstrous’ Macron is virtually a devil incarnate although not as smart as Satan because he made snide remarks, sneered at the poor, and failed to corrupt them up front for appeasements that would soon be wiped out with inflation.

You see, animals are not stupid. The brutish, ‘Jupiter’ Macron, is both lion and fox, in keeping with Machiavelli’s formula for becoming a successful prince.

“The thought of Macron, too complex to be really understood, will enter the minds of citizens faster with the help of flash balls. At the behest of Jupiter’s reason, power breaks teeth, breaks bones, lets out eyes from their sockets, shatters jaws, tears out hands, handicaps, invalidates, fractures, hurts. Eleven people died so far. This armed response illustrates the lion’s share that Machiavelli tells us that with that of the fox, they share the political cake.”

He refers to Machiavelli’s recommendation that, “A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from snares, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize snares, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those that wish to be only lions do not understand this. Therefore a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them…. Those that have been best able to imitate the fox have succeeded best. But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler.”

Monsieur Onfray attended a Catholic boarding school he did not like yet he obviously learned to sympathize with the poor and oppressed; he does not like seeing the common people brutalized by the power elite, now represented by The Brute. His listing of the victims of the brutish government is heartrending; we wonder why the United Nations did not intervene with troops after its human rights experts denounced the oppressive police tactics employed against the Yellow Vests; to wit: “Since the start of the yellow vest protest movement in November 2018, we have received serious allegations of excessive use of force. More than 1,700 people have been injured as a result of the protests across the country,” the experts said. “The restrictions on rights have also resulted in a high number of arrests and detentions, searches and confiscations of demonstrators’ possessions, and serious injuries have been caused by a disproportionate use of so-called ‘non-lethal’ weapons like grenades and defensive bullets or ‘flash-balls’.”

Onfray himself deplores “the violence of this Maastrichtian [EU] state against single women, single mothers, widows with amputated retirement pensions, women forced to rent their uterus for a mercenary sperm, victims of conjugal violence arising from poverty, young boys or girls who prostitute themselves to pay for their studies; the violence of this Maastrichtian state over the rural private day after day of the public service that their indirect taxes finance yet; the violence of this Maastrichtian state over the peasants who hang themselves every day because the ecologist profession of faith of the urban Maastrichtians does not clutter with ecology when it comes to the plate of the French that they fill with meat damaged, toxic products, carcinogenic chemistry, food from the end of the planet without caring for the trace carbon and which can even be organic; the violence of this Maastrichtian state on the generations of children cretinized by a school that has ceased to be republican and which leaves to the girls and sons of the possibility to get out not thanks to their talents, but with the help from the piston of their well-born families; the violence of this Maastrichtian state which has proletarianized young people whose only hope is the security of employment of the police, the gendarme, the soldier or the prison guard and whose job is to manage through legal violence the waste from the liberal system; the violence of this Maastrichtian state on the small bosses, the tradesmen, the craftsmen who ignore the holidays, the leisure, the weekends, the outings – the violence there, yes, was the first violence. These are the ones that did not generate violence, but just a first protest against the increase of fuel.”

Fuel costs around $5.50 gallon in France. That is very expensive for low paid workers who have been pushed out of the expensive metropolitan centers into outlying areas and who must therefore drive to work if public transportation is unavailable, not to mention the high freight cost to distribute products, high cost of utilities and so on. That and more, including taxes associated with membership in the European Union have made it difficult for hundreds of thousands of people to make ends meet. It is so bad according to press reports that some families have to huddle for warmth in one room under a single light bulb. Yes, small farmers are reportedly committing suicide. Meanwhile the government is doling out money to emigrants, some of whom are living high off the hog in nice quarters. So people are madder than hell.

The proximate cause of the Yellow Vest mass movement was an increase in the gas tax intended to fund climate change mitigation programs, wherefore Monsieur Onfray argues that Articles 13 and 14 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen now embedded in the current Constitution specifically provide citizens with a right to determine for themselves whether taxes are needed, to consent to them, and to make sure the burden is distributed according to their ability to pay them. Some members of the economic class concerned here, mostly white, lower middle class workers, are angry with the elected representatives and therefore want to exercise their right for themselves, that is, directly. They have no power to initiate referendums under the Constitution, wherefore they would have the president or parliament amend the Constitution to provide the right of initiative.

Monsieur Onfray has apparently forgotten to mention Article 12, a provision that certainly appertains to the police brutality he claims is employed by the President of the Rich to suppress the poor:

“The guarantee of the rights of man and citizen requires a public force; this force then is instituted for the advantage of all and not for the personal benefit of those to whom it is entrusted.”

President Macron suggests that he may be amenable to the provision of limited direct democracy, but claims the crowd is not wise enough to, for example, manage the national budget. He has called what may be a sort of constitutional convention in a series of national debates around the country to determine what measures might be put forward for referendum. Monsieur Onfray, however, claims the national debates are just perfume for the monster’s campaign to lead the European Union. The representative of evil, of capitalism run rampant, is merely exploiting the crisis for his own personal good and that of the “Masstrichtian camp,” a communistic allusion to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty signed by members of the European Community to further European economic cooperation into a political confederation.

From Monsieur Onfray’s perspective as an indoctrinated materialist, the idealistic president of France is a reactionary phony and a liar. The debate is no debate at all because it terms are preconceived to arrive at foregone conclusions. Monster Macron, although a brute, is well versed in the methodology of the Greek sophists, and he is using empty rhetoric to pull the wool over the eyes of the ignorant, credulous masses in need of a thorough indoctrination in historical materialism, in anti-idealistic atheism, so the poor will not be deluded like Jesus into suffering the rich in the name of a non-existent god. Instead they shall take pleasure in self-serving hedonism. They shall be governed by epicures who shall determine what is most tasty.

As for the billions of Euros in concessions made to labor by the so-called President of the Rich aka King of the Bourgeoisie, they are mere “crumbs,” a favorite term of communist polemicists. And never mind the mainstream media. Its journalists are the power elite’s running dogs. What you see on television is really fake news, propaganda to perpetuate the ruling order it is beholden to. The audience is so untethered from reality that it perceives whatever appears in fabricated virtual reality as truth. President Trump over in America does not even bother to read much because he can please his fawning base by feeding Fox news with outrageous lies and taking the advice of his favorite conservative talk show host.

Monsieur Onfray claims that the President and his ministers fed mainstream media with false propaganda, casting the Yellow Vests as a motley crowd of racists, homophobes, anti-Semites, anarchists, not to mention the Anonymous. Brown shirts, black shirts, yellow vests: it makes no difference. As a matter of fact, they were there in small numbers to take advantage of the situation, just as political ideologues, philosophes, armchair journalists, professors, and other intellectual people flocked to the media outlets to hover over the movement. The Yellow Vest movement, we know, is not tightly organized and lacks a charismatic Mussolini, wherefore it is destined to peter out with modest gains to the cause. Some of its members tried to police the demonstrations, but gave way to the “wreckers,” who use tried and proven techniques of rioting to provoke the police, into overreacting and appearing as brutes.

Violence breeds violence: the brute in almost everyone becomes inflamed; nice people assault gendarmes, the insult is returned, and someone trying to get to work to make a living gets mad and drives his car into the crowd. Fortunately, few people have thus far been hurt in comparison to the thousands lost in China during the Tiananmen demonstration. Even so, pots like to call kettles black, and the rhetoric of Monsieur Onfray, who professes non-violence, projecting all the blame for the violence on the government, and particularly on President Macron, may serve, in the minds of the participants, to justify further outrages, for, as he says, “Words kill.” After all, what is going on here, he says, is “populicide,” the slaughter or massacre of innocents, so presumably righteous people have the right to take up arms in self-defense. The president, then, is a murderer, in a manner of speaking, and it shall be an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. At least he has, with the help of the infernal Masstrichtian press that amplified his vilifications, murdered the souls of hundreds of thousands of poor working people, has rendered them zombies, wage slaves, that is, if they are lucky to have work instead of welfare.

Words from Monster Macron’s mouth are not merely bullshit. They are, of course, “symbolic violence” in the ears of people who disagree with him, opines Monsieur Onfray, and, what’s more, they are warmongering slaps in the face! Imagine being told that you do not know what is going on, and your ideas of reform are worthless because true reform is not a child’s play! And, he suggests without any evidence that agent provocateurs were at work for the government to provoke the crowd so gendarmes could beat the hell out of people, engage in murderous populicide, and terrorize the survivors into not coming back the next weekend. This is enough to cause some people to reach for their weapons in self-defense, to say that the best defense is an offense. But of course he does not recommend violence. It is best for a hedonist to refrain from violence if he would please himself for long, or for an epicure to retire to a utopian commune to appreciate the finest things of life instead of gorging oneself with red meat, or, better yet, to escape from reality by writing philosophical books because the best thing to do about something is nothing when the conclusion is ordained from the beginning: Never mind the brutal state: it will wither away one day, and people will live happily ever after, at least until a comet destroys Earth before humankind inhabits other planets.

Our philosophy professor is correct when he says the police overreacted, that its means were brutal in comparison to the method taken to quell violent rioters in 2005, and that the “child king” failed to immediately take appropriate action when the movement began. But he is incorrect when he says the President is a liar if he says he is not personally responsible for injuries and deaths, because, in fact, he is the head of state, and as such he is a murderer. The brute is him, sayeth Onfray. Do not blame his ministers entirely for the decisions made, for he chose the repression; each wound inflicted is his fault. He is a perfect scapegoat.

My first thought when I saw the videos of the demonstrations was, “Why are the gendarmes tear gassing demonstrators and shooting at them with flash balls and trapping them in side streets to beat them up when they were just standing still or walking peacefully on the Champs-Élysee? The way this is going pleases the anarchists.”

There did not seem to be any rules of engagement except to engage the protestors in one way or another just to be doing something. Why so much tear gas? Tear gas can seriously damage the lungs, and is outlawed in war. Why the flash balls? There are other devices that disintegrate on impact, and there are water cannon. Why are they shooting people in the head with flash balls?

Not that I am a “bleeding heart liberal.” In fact, I was in Chicago with my family during the great blizzard, and when Mayor Daly said “Shoot looters to kill,” I agreed that shooting criminals after warning them was good policy. And I would not have cried out loud except for the loss to relatives if the French police shot wreckers engaged in destruction of property, looting of shops, and endangering the public. Of course that may be bad policy since that may enrage a crowd to overwhelm the police, but I am not a politician.

My personal opinion was not that some monster named Macron, in collusion with the EU government, had ordered his minister to have the police terrorize the peaceful demonstrators in order to boost his aristocratic ego, perhaps become a virtual president of a United States of Europe, and cause dissidents to cringe and go home with tails between the legs. Imagine, what was going on behind the scenes? Was a communist plot detected and a coup feared?

More likely, what we saw was the result of inexperience, bad training of the rank and file, and outmoded police methodology. More likely, the government learned from the experience. More likely, Monsieur Macron is not as arrogant as he looked in the beginning, and that he and his cabinet and Brigitte loved the French in French people well enough to listen to people and provide billions in relief to everyone concerned. That relief is not as crummy as the power-hungry leftists would have it. The whole thing is a blow to the economy at the wrong time, just as the UK, which contracted nationalism measles, might exit the EU.

On the one hand, Onfray, whom we hope is a not a classic cynic or someone who has little faith in the value in the salvational value of the artificial or idealized cultures of man hence would presumably take pleasure in living like a dog under the porch and fornicating at will in public, portrays the President as being as clever as Satan. But on the other hand he mocks him for not being clever, that is, for not being as cynical as Pompidou back in May ’68.

He credits Pompidou with ending the disturbance by employing intermediate bodies with a political cynicism should have inspired Monsieur Macron: union and government officials colluded in meetings culminating in the Grenelle Accords with spectacular salary increase, increase of the unprecedented minimum wage, reduction of the weekly working time, expansion of the right to organize, a boost to family allowances, an increase in the benefits offered to the elderly, payment of strike days, lower user fees for social security, knowing very well that inflation would offset these gains a few years later.

Well, yes, it would behoove the President of France, that is, if he would be a great man instead of a diacritical mark over a vowel in French history, to promote the provision of such relief as can be had within reason, and that is what he is doing albeit he was late in the uptake. Yes, he knows that inflation might wipe out those gains, especially if more money is printed to foster socialism. As an investment banker he knows that inflation tends to reduce the value of debt, which can be a very bad thing for investors. So I suppose he is cynical enough about the competitive nature of man to try to strike a compromise that might keep the people on the Middle Way, namely, the wisest path, perhaps a yellow or gold path that will widen the middle economic class and keep people fat enough to stay off the warpath.

As for May ’68, I must attend Monsieur Onfray’s class, because I thought it was actually Charles de Gaulle who saved France from revolution and not Pompidou’s “cynicism.” The great general was unpopular at the time, but when he disappeared to a military compound in German and his wife secured the family jewels, he gave the people the classic choice between order and chaos: the overwhelming number of people chose order and went back to work.

I expect the French people will most likely choose order today. Reforms are needed. People have their liberties and they are indeed suffering liberally. But they are not eating grass and rotten bread filled with sawdust and ground up bones of people starved to death. Would be leaders of the Yellow Vest movement are at odds with one another, and the gentler ones, the ladies, are being insulted and threatened as the movement is boiled down to its diehards. The movement does not have the students and the unions. It does not have a Mussolini and philosophers to fashion a popular political platform.

May revolution and war be forgone although militants advocate it, reasoning that a conflict is needed to keep the wheel of progress rolling forward. It would annihilate everyone in its path until total destruction is accomplished. May heaven forbid—the atheists would have their heaven on Earth. Herr Hegel the idealist was so shocked by the horrors of the Terror on French soil that he withdrew into the logical absurdity of dialectics. I prefer Madame Beauvoir’s ambiguities, but dialectic will do provided it is limited to pacific argument and constitutes rolling compromises.

The tendency of the progress of social organization is to growth and consolidation into a highly organized federal world or international global order tolerant of diverse cultures, states, and nations. That order is socialist, not the corporate board socialism of the few but the socialism of the many. Einstein was correct when he characterized nationalism as virus, a contagious disease. The West is suffering an outbreak of this disease. The EU may collapse. The United States of America, an indissoluble union of states forged in civil war with the help of French libertarians, has lost its bearing in truth. Lacking a vaccine, billions may die of the plague, but we think not because a socialist backlash is mounting.

The vaccine is the right balance of freedom in order. Yes, man must have matter, the ground or hypostasis, not to crawl upon but to stand erect upon with his head in heaven. If Monsieur Onfray were correct in his perception that the government of France is repressing people so they may not stand up for their rights, forcing them to crawl on their knees for crumbs or be imprisoned or liquidated, I would congratulate the intellectual giant for his eloquence. I refrain from doing so for now to see the effect of his words, whether they incite violence or motivate peaceful reform.

Shorn of its rhetorical ornaments and sophistries, his philosophy appears to be molded by communist propaganda of the pacifist sort. We might say, to please the French, that it is a secularized French version of resentment, namely, ressentiment, a silent resentment that frustrated peoples have towards superiors whom they blame for their predicament yet do nothing about it whine, remaining submissive while feigning moral superiority.

I agree with the man on many things, for he is like me whether we like each other or not. I agree the most with his pronouncement that:

“The self must have a healthy relationship to itself if it is going to relate well with others. An identity that is either missing or weak prohibits any kind of ethics. Only the force of an I authorizes the mobilization of morality.”

Whom do we hate the most when we hate the others, and whom do we love the most when we love the others? Hypocrisy is the underlying crisis between our ideals and realities. We hate because we love something better. Confess and forgive the beast, have faith in your higher self, hope for the best, and you shall have charity.

Once upon a time, when ‘France’ stood for ‘freedom’, France enlightened the world, but Lady Liberty, who led peoples from rule by few towards rule by many, has lost her luster of late. In fact she is despondent and at times hysterical.

A mere year ago we expected France to lead a Europe out of the darkness into enlightened unity, but now the Frankish masses complain they are being smothered by immigrants and strangled by taxes. This has been going on for some time, and they cannot stand it anymore. They just want to be French, again, and they would burn their house down rather than suffer another day in the vices of a soi disant union. One thing they do not want is the alienating advice of the predatory capitalist elite represented by the current government.

Britain, who once ruled the seas, still prefers the more conservative English Enlightenment to the liberal French Enlightenment, wherefore she would exit the European Union, ungracefully if necessary. She is not the only one. Nationalist dissonance resounds in every state today, even across the pond in the United States. Disunion, disintegration, dissolution is the tendency of the populaces unwilling to pay the purportedly temporary price of consolidation for long-term benefits in the Promised Land.

We once beheld France for the sake of Progress. Now we behold her regression. Let it be a warning to the world. She is dispirited, depressed, her countenance has a deathly pallor. It is as if she lives just to die, weary of the productive span between birth and death. Indeed, the metaphysical substance of France is decaying like the nearly spoiled, discounted meat the poor housewife brings home from the market to keep frozen until she cooks it over a trash fire to save electricity and serves it to her family, who wear several layers of clothes or are wrapped in blankets under a single light bulb at the dinner table.

No, the bread of life is not yet blackened and filled with sawdust, but it is moldy enough for hallucinations. We see thousands of people milling in the streets with yellow traffic vests, provoked to madness by anarchists and police.

The globalists have a rational argument that the human race would stabilize and prosper economically if only it were singularly incorporated. Yet we have good reason to suspect that Totalitaria is bound to fail. Everyone has a rebel within, a fact that advances and protects the race from total disaster. We are identified by how we passively and actively react to circumstances. We need our differences and mutual identifications to sustain life. Variety is so dearly wanted because it is the spice of life.

Fortunately for our palates, the French are good with spices. Various spices were offered to the gods in prehistoric times. Today many French households cannot afford meat, let alone spices. Such luxuries are commonplace, however, in the palaces, mansions, and restaurants of the neo-nobility, the effete snobs who believe their net worth measures their virtue.

Of course that phenomenon is not peculiar to the French elite. An economic class is not an ethical class. We all know high class people who are no better than low class people. We know members of the ruling class who have risen like scum to the top of the pond yet are snobs who think they are better than everyone else. They are most despised in France, and not only by communists.

Times are certainly tough for many French people. Still things are not as bad as they seem, and the definition of bad is relative. Camille, a highly educated, attractive woman in her forties, suffers because she has to pay $6 or more for a gallon of gas. She is a good woman, kind at heart, a conservative woman in the sense that she does not think like a man. She has studied and worked hard for decades, winding up single. The garage at her home outside of Paris has no electric outlet. She also suffers property taxes and maintenance fees. She cannot afford to go out and socialize. No, she cannot make ends meet and has to borrow from her parents although she earns slightly above the national median income. She might have to sell the home and move in with her parents. France is so depressing lately given the killer taxes and its black mood that she thinks of death. Yes, she is very wealthy compared to a Cro-Magnon woman, but human wants have become needs, so a cave and fire will not do. Of course those of us who pay $2.50 a gallon of gas certainly sympathize with her. On the other hand, there are many of us in the United States, the greatest superpower and wealthiest nation in the world, who think she is lucky to even have a car, a home, a garage, parents who can afford to take her in if need be, a responsible job, and her good looks. An ambitious single American woman might even scoff at her, and tell her she does not need a husband, that she should strive to become CEO of Google instead of crying in her champagne, but she would not scoff if she understood the traditionally misogynist politics of France.

Hundreds of thousands of people in France below the median income are even worse off, and they do not want to take it anymore, so they took to the streets and the highways, and they are damaging the economy. The concessions made by the government to quell the unrest will cost billions, but pessimist pundits who lust for blood call them “crumbs,” “empty talk,” “mere words.” Many members of the upper middle class honk their horns approvingly, and even a few members of the elite are sympathetic. That is a good sign for reform. However, all too many people would rather have a revolution than billions in concessions and decades of muddling; they would fain die in the revolutionary process rather than continue with a material life they have learned to hate because there is never enough stuff to consume. Mind you that it is not the stuff they really want. The material concessions given are bound to be insufficient. They want so many different things that it is hard to say what they want. Some do not even know. That was a phenomenon recorded by historians in previous revolutions: people were rioting, unsure of what they wanted except blood, perhaps to see the severed head of a rich man on a pike or in a bucket at the guillotine.

The catholic spirit seems to be lacking today. Religion used to take care of that. Not anymore. It is unfair, however, to lay the blame on a dearth of spirit, for the anarchic spirit of rebellion is alive and well. That much is instinctive. So law and order, or what we call freedom in order, must prevail or many shall die. But whose law and order? Whose freedom? Are we to have primitive equality or predatory hierarchy? The French police called out to keep order during the riots are weary and emotionally disturbed. They contributed to the rioting by abusing people with baton charges, tear gas, water cannon, and hard rubber balls. The demonstrators were just milling around aimlessly. It may have been better to let them demonstrate, hand out marijuana, pipe in some music, yet use lethal force on vandals and looters.

But never mind, the police were just following orders, and now they want their fair share of the Yellow Vest spoils in the form of a bonus, but a bonus might not be enough. You see, they have causes in common with the Yellow Vests, and at this juncture nothing is enough, or only nothing is enough if the death instinct is in play to prove that the purpose of life is death of the individual to preserve the species. If this irrational movement ran the usual French course, the gendarmes and National Guard would ultimately side with their own people, that is, the working masses who lack the means of production, as opposed to the bourgeoisie who are eating from fine plates. In that event, the government would fall and not be replaced until a new constitution is written, perchance for the National Socialist Democracy of France. So France, which the Polish minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, mocked as the “sick man of Europe,” is indeed leading Europe, and perhaps not in a direction wanted by the investment bankers, but to another round of revolution and war, perhaps even a world war between rich and poor instead of between the rich and rich.

An apocalypse, an uncovering of the horrors of human nature, is possible. The “division” being experienced among peoples of several nations is between Love and Strife, Eros and Thanatos, Life and Death. Prophecies of doom are made so that people can make sure everything possible is done to forestall doom, for doom is the judgement of Dom, and surely the unrighteous will be damned to hell unless they mend their ways.

President Emmanuel Macron of France has been characterized by mainstream media, on the one hand, as charismatic, handsome, and articulate, and, on the other hand, as arrogant, imperious, and condescending. Is he a great man or a mere diacritical mark over a vowel in French history?

Charisma is the key to transformative leadership, and charisma, like prestige, depends on virtually miraculous deeds, not on good looks and sophistry, and it may be appreciated all the more when the man is arrogant, imperious and condescending as people bask in the reflected glory of his deeds. When success turns to failure, charisma is lost forthwith, and the man had better retire before he is utterly disgraced.

The fact that Macron was an investment banker and bureaucrat and is now an elected politician tends to disqualify him from punctuating world history with marvelous deeds although not necessarily so. Thus far he has wasted public money on expensive dishware and talked the liberal talk of the upper bourgeoisie, casting himself as a president of the rich and a wannabe king. He condemns welfare fraud and labor unions, makes snide remarks to workers who complain of unemployment, and proposes tax cuts for the wealthy and refers to their tax evasions as “fiscal optimizations.”

Yet the debonair French president has been quite charming on the international stage. He certainly used his charm to make a fool out of President Trump, the epitome of vulgar populism in America, going so far as to pat him on the knee, and the intellectual world is grateful for that.

Macron was never popular in France, where he was portrayed as leading a grand march to victory over populist foes. Elected as the least of several evils on the left-right political spectrum, he was so out of touch with the travails of labor that riots were incited by his gas tax hike to save the climate. Eighty-percent of the population, almost everyone who works or wants work, sympathized with the hordes of demonstrators wearing emergency yellow jackets. Wherefore the suave gentleman in his fine suit and shiny shoes has lately been dubbed “toxic.”

That does not mean Macron will never be a great man. He is naïve and may yet prove blessed by the gods. Great men, like gods, make big mistakes, and are accordingly defamed, but their goods exceed their evils in the final analysis, when the universe implodes to expand yet again from nothing, for nothing and only nothing is perfect.

Victor Cousin, the French philosopher who laid the foundation for the French and American education systems, developed a great man theory from his studies of history, which convinced him that there were more great men among philosophers than elsewhere.

“The fundamental rule of philosophy,” declared Cousin, “in regard to great men is to do as humanity does… to neglect the description of weaknesses inherent in their individuality and which have perished with it… to fasten itself upon the great things which they have done, which have served humanity, and which still endure in the memories of men… to search out what has given them power and glory, namely, the idea they represent, and their intimate relation with the spirit of their times and their nation….”

Macron’s big mistake has been his treatment of ordinary workers, the concrete foundation that upholds his elitist regime on the top floors.

Gaulish workers have not forgotten the socialist Principles of ’89 the aristocracy would monopolize for themselves. Gauls have real revolution in their blood, and are not inclined to bend over as far their reformist cousins in America do in hopes of getting rich quick themselves. Macron sympathized with the wage slaves after the Yellow Jacket protests, but they require more than fancy talk, and soon. Although they are not yet forced to buy sawdust flour or rotting bread, they are not prepared to wait for scraps to trickle down from the dinner table Macron has laid out for capitalists eager to cheapen labor until workers are desperate enough to work for a pittance.

The liberal conservatives, in the interest of conserving the lion’s share of the world’s wealth, persuaded themselves that France was impeding progress with its mixed economy. A highly regulated labor market with generous social benefits supported by high taxes simply would not suffice for global prosperity.

One might imagine that the typical French worker was rendered lazy and incompetent, fat, dumb and happy by short working hours, long holidays, extended vacations, free medical care, cheap bread, discounted fine wine and cheese. That would be the ideal state as far as lazy Chinese emperors of yore were concerned as they changed palaces every month, for then they could rule by doing nothing except collect taxes. Such is not the case in France, where many thousands of honest workers have been taxed into the red, and are beginning to thirst for blood.

The same thing said about the French market was once said about the German mixed market, which was expected to collapse after the Wall came down, absorbing millions of poor people into the democratic federal republic, yet it has prospered, wages are high, and the generous social benefits persist. Is that because Germany is a hog, or are the Germans more efficient? Could it be a question of mental attitude? Should the French language become more guttural and less slurred, impressionistic and romantic?

Perhaps France needs an upgraded Napoleon I or Napoleon III or Charles de Gaulle to prosper the economy and restore prestige to France. The quest for glory and the hubris of great men toppled their empires, so it is a wonder that the charisma of the first Napoleon still persists while that of the third was lost with the German victory. The third deserves celebration because Napoleon III recognized the worth of labor and advanced the industrial revolution.

Hail Caesar! France loves strong military leaders. General de Gaulle was not an imperialist although he expected France, made great again, to be the European leader as a nation state, not as a member of a European union. He rejected U.S. domination. Roosevelt feared de Gaulle would become a dictator if not an emperor. Thanks in part to the U.S. Marshall Plan, France enjoyed thirty prosperous years from 1945 to 1975, dubbed Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975, by demographer Jean Fourastié.

Macron’s poses has caused him to be disparagingly compared to Caesar and Louis XIV. The satire reveals a certain truth, to wit, the great expectation that a savior will appear to save France from its predicaments whatever they might be. The French have yet to be advised, “Ask not what the government can do for you, ask what you can do for France, and then get it done.” We deserve our leaders, even absent a republic or democracy, therefore everyone should strive to be a better leader in order to press the best leaders forward and remove the worst ones from office by the best means available for the change or overthrow of governments.

It is said that Russians love to obey strong men. Yet a great Russian author noted that great men are made men. “A king is history’s slave,” Tolstoy penned in War and Peace. “Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evidence is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.”

Macron is the man of the moment, and he can be a great man for France and Europe if persuaded to be history’s slave, that is, if history is, as Victor Cousin averred, the history of progress, and progress is the history of liberty.

The People are ready to act, and want positive inspiration and a great plan that is in accord with the survival and progress of the race.

Macron wants to save the planet, for example, from the ravages of climate change caused by man, so let him come up with a business plan to finance and implement a salvation plan immediately, and include in the budget for that program and other public works ample funding for the training and employment of a well paid, massive workforce, including women standing on a equal footing with men, and immigrants as well, so that migrants will want to stay in France and work instead of pile up trying to get to England. Engage that workforce to perfect a rapid, distributed public transportation system that runs like clockwork, and to invent and manufacture French alternative energy folk cars. Take advantage of technology to build a vast virtual workplace in the cloud for telecommuters. Convert land from the production of livestock protein to plant protein. Make sure livestock feed is supplanted with Gas-X to reduce methane pollution for the production of great cheeses. That is not all. Review science fiction for ideas.

“But where is the money going to come from? Certainly the economy will fail if we embark on such quixotic endeavors.”

Not.

Macron, if he personifies progress, knows well the trade secret of money, and he is fully aware that much of the medium of exchange goes for the purchase of wanted things instead of necessities. Today a great deal of the gross product is immaterial! And much of the material product is trash, at least in the eyes of the well to do who can afford fine plates and silver at the dinner table.

A great man with a glib tongue, great ideas, and budgeting skills can make France great again if he gives full faith and credit to the workforce. Then he shall have the prestige of a great man, an elite man, a member of the great man aristocracy.

“Truly, a fine catch of fish has Zarathustra made to-day! It is not a man he has caught, but a corpse. Uncanny is human existence and as yet without meaning: a buffoon can become a man’s fate and fatality.” (1)

The late United States of America was gradually recovering from the Great Recession brought on by the pandering of its regressive administrations to the principle of freedom rooted in unmitigated greed, evaluating individuals solely in material terms, when the people got so bored again with the progressive swing to an equalitarian global order that they wanted to make America great again.

Yes, the American people, who had not suffered much lately, had been saved from an economic disaster, and they had grown exceedingly bored again, mostly for want of political entertainments such as revolution and war. So the fools found a “fool,” a ‘bag of wind’ or ‘bellows,’ a “buffoon” or entertainer who ‘puffs out his cheeks,’ among their own worst enemies, and declared him king.

The king was a natural fool whose crudeness and guileless infatuation with his monumental ego appealed to the vanity of millions upon millions of sycophants who were as blind to his defects as to their own faults. His critics including members of his own court called him a fool a moron, a clown, or even worse, yet he was still deemed to be closer to the ultimate truth of everyone, that everyone is inherently a fool no matter what is said, and this fool is so foolish that he is closest to the god in each and everyone one of them.

The people are king in a democracy, and this king was their fool, their political jester and jouster, their Anglo-Saxon Till Eulenspiegel. He turned America into a travelling carnival or political affair, changing his tune daily and mocking politicians and public figures along the way. The jester’s hat on his head emitted a golden aura, a charismatic light that enchanted roughly thirty percent of the population subjected to him, like it or not. Americans, you see, were insane, un-whole, and he was the divisive mirror of their time.

It was said that the King of America was stupid. Mind you, however, that he was wise enough to play the fool. His first great triumph for his criminal court was convincing the masses that they were being enriched while being robbed. It was for fear of losing even more that his dear ones wanted to erect a wall on the southern border of his castle. And he stacked his court with fools.

Fools all, but never mind, for there is wisdom in stupidity. As the fool praised by Erasmus said, “The more foolish anything is, the more tis admired, the greater number being ever tickled at the worst things, because most men are so subject to folly. And If the more foolish a man is, the more he pleases himself and is admired by others, to what purpose should he beat his brains about true knowledge, which first will cost him dear, and next render him the more troublesome and less confident, and lastly, please only a few?”

No, the King of America was not the first egotistical fool to head a great state nor shall he be the last. Erasmus once remarked on the proverb, that one may lawfully praise himself that lives far from neighbors. Now democracy permits all to flatter their own selves to no end, undaunted Self-love or Philautia is enshrined. Wherefore worship this American Fool, for Folly provides the greatest wealth, namely, unbounded self-love.

It was foolishly said that Folly readily and indifferently bestows benefits on all.

“I do not care to be entreated,” sayeth Folly, “nor am I subject to take offense, and I require an expiatory sacrifice if some ceremony be omitted. For why should I require incense, wafers, a goat, or sow when all men pay me that worship everywhere?” And Folly promises riches to all. “I am, as you see, that true and only giver of wealth whom the Greeks call Moria, the Latin Stultitia, and our plain English Folly.”

Unfortunately for the late King of America, he was merely a fool, a great fool, indeed, but not Folly herself. He over-reached and insulted too many influential people, and was duly dethroned. Still many aspire to his greatness. His book, full of crude jokes about his opponents, has been a best seller for some time.

Secular charisma, as Weber knew very well from his own circumstances in Germany, is indifferent to ethical, aesthetic, and moral considerations. It is perceived as divinely-originating “gift,” and the leader is seen as infallible. Action against him will be seen as a crime against the state. A cult of personality is developed. He is irrational, a narcissist, violating protocol and traditional norms. He displays an extraordinary amount of energy and is unhindered by anxieties and guilt.

The most that can be said of the fool is that he is no hypocrite if he loves himself alone. Alas for the leading fool, however, because his charisma wanes as greedy fools gorge themselves on ill-gotten gains, and then egomaniacal foolishness finally is exposed. High hopes are unrealized, and great expectations are dashed by pestilence, depression, war, and death. The King of America was abandoned soon enough to make America great again.

AN APPEAL FOR REFORM OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

By David Arthur Walters

July 31, 2018

“The question is in truth between the people and the Supreme Court. We contend that the great constructive principle of our system is in the people of the states, and our opponents that it is in the Supreme Court. This is the sum total of the whole difference; and I hold him a shallow statesman ,who, after proper examination does not see, which is most in conformity to the genius of our system and the most effective and safe in its operation.” (1)

The ideologically stacked United States Supreme Court has made an elephant’s ass of itself at the behest of the Senate and the President by deciding cases on the basis of political ideology conveniently disguised as “conservative” to conserve and advance the interests of the power elite rather than on the substantive merits.

Vacancies on the court have as a matter of fact been openly filled by judges with opinions coinciding with the prejudices of Senators fearful for their own fortunes hence more interested in conserving and augmenting the fortunes of their wealthy patrons than in conserving the liberties of the people at large.

Indeed, the Republican majority in the Senate is proud to declare this berobed embodiment of its temporal prejudice in the highest court the font of the supreme law of the land for decades to come.

Thus are people in common embarrassed by the Senate, the hallowed vestige of the king’s noble court, now subservient to a fortunately temporary king widely believed to be a self-indulgent, impulsive fool, the very laughing stock of the free press he would fain silence for being the best friend of the people.

The Court, on the other hand, has also been crudely disgraced, having taken on the appearance of a long-term donkey court because of its stubborn tendency to self-preservation no matter how asinine its opinions, and a kangaroo court as well because it jumps to ideological conclusions before cases are tried.

This preposterous situation is largely the historical outcome of Alexander Hamilton’s federalist rhetoric; clauses in the Constitution providing for the tenure of justices on good behavior, and the supremacy of the Court; the 25th Section of the 1789 Judiciary Act; and the evolved “judicial review” opinions of a Court that elevated itself over the executive and legislative branches of the national government as well as over the people of the several states, which were sovereign only in rebellion after the Articles of Confederation were replaced with a national Constitution, an inviolable contract in contrast to the former league.

Wherefore a judicial aristocracy, now numbering nine unelected justices, presides over the “living constitution” of the United States. Five justices, to the horror of the other four, are presently committed to politically and culturally regressive policies instead of traditional constructive progress, not to mention the common sense of justice that ancient sages thought every sane adult should have or else be banished from civilization.

No amendment of the Constitution is necessary to remedy the usurpation of power attributed to “judicial review,” for the good reason that judicial review is not one of the powers enumerated in the Constitution in the first place. The Constitution definitely provides for limitations or exclusions from the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction:

“The Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

All that is required to remedy the unconstitutional construction is a judiciary act of Congress, the legitimate legislative body representing the sovereign people, amending or replacing the 1789 Judiciary Act.

The wheel does not need to be reinvented inasmuch as this one has taken us a long way and we have learned a great deal along the journey although we are now at an absurd impasse where we have good reason to ridicule the Supreme Court for making a complete ass of itself under the influence of cracked pots in Congress. Those pots need to be mended and the judiciary reformed. Congress is in fact the sovereign lawmaking institution, and it should form a Constitutional Committee to review the judiciary, compare it with the systems of other advanced nations, and recommend reforms.

For example, the Constitutional Committee might recommend the appointment of a permanent independent Constitutional Council of rotating scholars and laypersons to review all bills for their constitutionality before they are passed into law.

The concept of the judicial review of constitutionality of bills after they are passed into law is rather peculiar to the United States of America, an institution without which, given the milieu of those formative days, we might have no Union.

Lawyers naturally reverence the court of final resort, which should not be mocked as it is now for its usurpation of power. Nevertheless, definite restraints should be put on the appellate power of their hallowed Court. That does not mean it should be completely emasculated. There would remain some cases for the reformed Supreme Court to review, chosen according to the common sense principle laid down by Sir Edward Coke in Dr. Bonham’s case in England, a principle sometimes cited by scholars as a precedent for the development of judicial review in the United States.

“[I]t appears in our books, that in many cases, the common law will control Acts of Parliament, and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void: for when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it, and adjudge such Act to be void.”

Justice Coke did not have to be one of the most profound doctors of jurisprudence or have infinite wisdom to see how ridiculous was the Act of 14 H.S. requiring physicians practicing in London to be examined and obtain a license from the College of London even though Dr. Bonham happened to have gotten his doctorate degree from Justice Coke’s own alma mater, the University of Cambridge.

Since then other judges opined that judges existed to decide cases of law, and to do that they must interpret the law, thus adding common law to statutory law. That is to say that judges must say what the law is in order to apply it. Judges in the American colonies and in the fledging United States had the same opinion from time to time although they were reluctant at first to expound on it for fear of losing their jobs.

Still, it was not the practice for English courts to declare acts unconstitutional for that would constitute an absurdity. The constitution was unwritten, or rather was the whole body of law itself, with English civil rights preserved in various historical charters and bills. The courts fought long and hard for independence from the sovereign. Parliament itself won the crown in fact although it was worn by the royal figure. The Law Lords of the House of Lords served as the highest appellate court of appeal until 2009. They now constitute the Supreme Court, and may not sit in the House of Lords at the same time, hence in theory making them independent of the legislative body. Only very important or complicated cases came before the Law Lords, and they did not have the express power to declare a law unconstitutional.

Our proposed Constitutional Committee may want to consider whether or not the best place for an appeal on significant constitutional questions is the legislative branch that forged the statute in question for one might think that institution would know best. In any case, pending the reform of the Court, it might suit the chief justice to send a memo to the clerks instructing them to not forward constitutional appeals to him unless the statute or opinion of the lower court challenged appears to be unreasonable, nonsensical, repugnant, impossible or disastrous to effect, or, in another word, absolutely ridiculous, all others to be returned with the advice to pursue the matter with the appropriate legislature.

The power of judicial review in the United States was advanced by John Marshall and successfully employed as a political instrument to regulate the various states, which were in fact called “sovereign” in the practically useless Articles of Confederation. Certain Amendments as to the civil rights were made to the Constitution in order to obtain its approval although some Founders figured everyone should know what their English rights were. It was the Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states that became more than problematic when the Southern states felt the dominant Northern states were encroaching on their federal constitutional guarantees with tariff and slave bills.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Almost every fifth grader selected for a TV quiz show knows that Virginia and Kentucky and then South Carolina resolved to nullify what their state legislators felt were unconstitutional federal statutes violating the civil rights of their citizens and thus were destructive of their society or economy. The most offensive of the Alien and Sedition Acts would be repealed, and a compromise was had with South Carolina on the abominable tariff, yet the rebellious spirit persevered, especially over slavery, winding up in secession, the defeat of the Confederate States, and reunification.

The notions of all kinds of reserved states’ rights wound up being determined and winnowed down by the supreme federal institution, the unelected Supreme Court, until there is hardly anything left of a plurality. Today we hear the President and his colleagues say that certain things they do not like such as health care, abortion, and gay marriage, and union contributions law “should be up to the states.” Naturally laws they like should not be up to the states. Wherefore they would stack the court accordingly.

So perhaps a woman could get a divorce and an abortion and marry a woman on the same day in a particular state, or none of the above in another. And one can image the constitutional objections that would naturally be brought to the disparities between the states, especially by the poor woman who could not afford to get to Nevada let alone pay for the services.

It is feared that the president’s selection of a candidate, seen smiling smugly beside his pious, better-than-thou vice president, would roll back liberal advances in judge-made law, to conserve, for example, the primitive principle that men should own women’s bodies. The debate itself may move the candidate, if he is confirmed, to let the precedent stand. If he does not, the voters may revolt against his benefactors in the Senate and White House.

Abortion is always a hot button issue. Unions have lost their allure. Their bargains with government do not seem to help the worker that much, and tend more or less to put labor under tyranny of two governments, which seem to have collaborated to his or her disadvantage in the case of public unions. Recently the organized teachers of several states rebelled against pathetic wages, and they received a pittance for their trouble.

Union dues are a financial burden. Some right-to-work states required non-union members to pay their fair share of the purported benefits of collective bargaining. That was perfectly constitutional for decades according to a Supreme Court precedent recently upheld by 4:4 split due to an unfilled vacancy on the court. Everyone expected the precedent to be overturned with the appointment of an ideologue to that seat, and it was indeed duly overturned as expected by virtue of an informal political quid pro quo furthering the corruption of the court.

Mark Janus had been found willing to buck the system in Illinois and to say he did not like to contribute the cost of his share of the benefits of collective bargaining, so the lawyers had a field day with the constitutional right of free speech. “Under Illinois law,” pronounced Justice Alito on June, 27, 2018, in Mark Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees et al, “public employees are forced to subsidize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bargaining and related activities. We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of non-members by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

“Matters of substantial public concern” are what the power elite including its press determines them to be, otherwise the cases will not see the light of day. For example, when I asked for an important Florida case to be put online so persons interested do not have to travel to the courthouse to review it, the chief justice of that circuit informed me that the mainstream press determines what is significant enough to publish online. The judiciary obviously does not want the public to be concerned with the everyday behavior of courts that potentially affects it because it might be shocked by what goes regularly transpires. Rights such as free speech are not absolute when free speech is against the public interest. Speech may be restrained when selling three-dimensional programs to print unregistered guns will result in chaos or the anarchy desired by the seller.

Mark Janus could have had recourse to the Illinois legislature, but no, he must have been so outraged at a few hundred dollars of deductions every year from his salary that his lawyers needed to make it a judicial issue and appeal it to the highest court, politically prepared to rehear hear it, an appellate process that might cost more than a million dollars in legal fees for reputedly excellent lawyers if the plaintiff cares enough to pay out of pocket.

Several proposals have been made to get around the loss of funds unions are expected to suffer because non-members like Janus do not want to pay for the benefits whatever they are. I propose that the states offer no benefits negotiated by the unions to non-members, leaving persons like Janus free to speak for himself or through an agent when applying for a job. That process would eventually create a free market price for the functions so fervently desired by economic libertarians.

The Governor, Attorney General, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, for example, are not going to proclaim the Janus decision null and void within the boundaries of the state. No, Nullification and Secession do not work well. The oppositional Nullification theory advanced the wheel of Sisyphus from horizon to horizon. The consensus medieval theories are inapplicable today. (3)

But our Constitutional Committee should examine nullification ideology along with the “concurrent majority” reasoning of such Nullifiers of John Calhoun, former Secretary of War, Vice President and Senator, and other Nullifiers such as Robert James Turnbull (‘Brutus’).

Calhoun was raised by a slaveholding dad, and he saw firsthand how decently slaves were treated. He, like the descendants of Hawaii’s plantation owners, claimed that life was much better for plantation slaves than for free workers. (2)

We are well aware of the pathetic condition of workers during the industrial revolution. Unions would be crucial in gaining relief from that virtual slavery. Conservatives blinded by their obsolete tradition and fear for their fortunes would like to roll back some of those gains, and the oligarchic Supreme Court would allow them to bypass the elected legislatures.

Notwithstanding a few employee-owned and democratically managed firms, the place where Americans spend the most of their time is not democratic by any means. We see no whips and chains. There is enough time off for leisure to buy sufficient consumable goods to keep the ball rolling and clog the world with mountains of trash, junk and garbage in the process. Yes, the material life is better, much to the disadvantage of the spiritual life distracted as it is by entertaining commercials, but untold millions of people are wage slaves. I was appalled by what a black union leader who hated Jack Welch with a passion said to me in New York. I identify him as black because blacks have a right to use the denigrating term: he claimed that technological workers are “technological niggers.”

Calhoun’s concurrent majority theory may remind one of the complex geocentric planetary theory replaced by the simple heliocentric theory. Nevertheless, our Constitutional Committee may find some useful ideas therein. Sectionalism will always be as great a problem as individualism. A certain degree of latitude or liberty is required for unity.

The best argument against the Nullifiers was given by President Andrew Jackson, so his famous 1832 Proclamation penned by Edward Livingston should be considered too. He was not altogether fond of the judiciary, and remarked once that, now that the Court had pronounced the law, let it try to enforce it. The foremost Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, advocated judicial review although it was not adopted in the Constitution. He discounted the danger of tyranny that might present, saying a Supreme Court, lacking a sword, would be the weakest institution.

Not so, not now that blind obedience is the custom, and any challenge to judicial review is rebutted with, “Stare Decisis! Res Judicata!”

Wake up! What was once a useful habit is converted into a bad habit and is a disgrace to the nation.

Perhaps the embarrassment that our still great nation presently suffers will expose the ideological religions as inherently idiotic so that the representatives of the people can see, in this instance, that judicial review as we know it is obsolete, and then proceed to draft and pass a judiciary act that will put it in its rightful place.

Until then, the usual means will be employed by the population to get around the opinions of a disgraceful Court. Nullification theory will not do, for it is patently absurd inasmuch as it uses constitutional arguments to destroy the constitution. Simple disobedience to law was more successful than open efforts at nullification. It is impossible to enforce all the laws on the books. A law unenforced is no law.

xYx

(1) John Calhoun, unpublished letter dated Sept. 1, 1831:

(2) “Slavery is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good… I may say with truth that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe—look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse… I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other” (John C. Calhoun, Feb 6, 1837)

(3) Unions are most powerful in the State of Hawaii. One might expect street protests over the Janus decision given Hawaii’s history and the belief of Native Hawaiians that their islands were stolen and the Kingdom forcefully overthrown by agents of the United States imperialism. Many natives were not very keen on working the invasive sugar plantations that supplanted the strips of land allotted to them under the kingdom. The demand for sugar resulted in the importation of virtual slaves, indentured servants, most of them from the East. Many of them stayed and struggled for many years to obtain civil rights, succeeding in large part because of their organization into unions.

Japanese Americans withstood insults and assaults, deprivation of rights, and even deportation during World War II, and they with their Asian colleagues and like-minded Caucasian notables were instrumental in the creation of the democratic organization for the state, one that the arch-conservative Malcolm Forbes denounced as “socialist.” Republicans are therefore a small minority. There are a few Republican true to republicanism and the democratic aspirations of the Party. Native Hawaiians with at least a rather small quota of native blood left wanted to create a tribe so they could enjoy the benefits of tribes on the Mainland. The majority of natives, however, believed that General Welfare under the Constitution is better than that provided by the Kings and Queens of Hawaii. The legislature was sympathetic to the tribal ideal. The issue was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on constitutional grounds, and that was the end of that.

Hawaii’s government and the public unions and the Democratic Party are one ball of wax in Hawaii. Yet Hawaii suffers like the Mainland. Average wages are not rising. Labor is being bled as usual much to the profit of the big corporations and other heirs to the remnants of the halcyon plantation days. The state like the rest of the nation is becoming more and more top heavy as the days pass.

Conservatives have good reason fear for their fortunes. Conservatism may be defined in terms of a general defense of social and economic inequality, with lip service given to free trade and competition, rather than an effort to uphold traditional institutions. Conservatism is an attempt then to maintain and augment power of the ruling elite by all means available including the resort to war in which the conservative leaders would rather not risk their lives in personal combat.

The underlying thesis of the Federalist or nationalist conservatives is obsolete today. It upholds and expands the contradictory vestiges of medieval tradition. It was authoritarian, centralized, a constitutional monarchy, the executive being limited by court of princes and republican estate. It placed emphasis on human imperfection, on Hobbes more than on Locke. It celebrated the organic society hierarchically organized with one head, the Supreme Court, supported by the propertied class.

The future of Hawaii as a cultural and financial treasure depends on the maintenance of the Hawaiian culture. We see sporadic demonstrations and memorials to the old kingdom from time to time, but no demonstration. The truth of the matter is that the natives are thoroughly assimilated. Not only they but the haoles (white invaders) may have to move to the Mainland to support themselves and their families.

And with Janus there is no vehement protest in Hawaii. A libertarian nativist relocated from the Heart of America says there may not be much of an impact because unions will be forced to become more productive to survive. That might as well be said of many small business entities facing mammoth competition from the big corporations.

A member of the old haole elite who is intimate with some of the evils of the public unions rejoices on his gentleman’s estate that the Constitutional right to free speech has been upheld by the Supreme Court. He thinks it is sad that good teachers leave the state because of the low pay, but he suggests no solution whatsoever. The Supreme Court legislated the supreme law of the land, and that is that.

Regina von Halstadt, an old friend of mine, said she knew exactly what the words on the back of Melania Trump’s jacket meant on her visit to the immigrant children’s shelter.

“It meant what it said, that she does really not care if kids are separated from their parents who enter our country illegally, and I don’t care either.”

“But you’re a mother,” I pleaded. “You must sympathize with the kids and their parents. They are being treated badly in their home countries. It is cruel to pull kids as young as a few months old out of the arms of their mothers and put them in cages.”

“They are illegal, and that is that! If they do not like their own countries they should change them. We need to build the wall. Anyone entering this country illegal should be shot at the border or put in concentration camps and the kids and their parents should be sent to the showers!”

“Regina, please stop acting like a Nazi. Surely you don’t mean that.”

“Yes I do, and I do not want to talk about it anymore.”

“But Regina….”

“No!”

“I just want to say….”

“No!”

Needless to say, Regina is an ardent Trump supporter, and a black-and-white thinker to boot. With her, it is them or us, so let it be them.

“They” are anyone who does not look like “us.” So “we” must be a whiter shade of pale, preferably with blonde or red hair and blue eyes.

I have blue eyes, and Regina likes me to shave my head of its brown hair. She once remarked with some surprise, as she watched Fox News, the only news she said she can tolerate, that Afghan kids look a lot like us. In any event, Regina loves power and wealth without prejudice against race, color, creed and sexual orientation.

Of course I have changed her name, with apologies to anyone with that name who finds her views disagreeable. Yes, she is of German extract. Her rich, powerful and unfaithful husbands were of European extract. They beat the hell out of her from time to time, and they paid dearly for it in the end, making it worth her while in retrospect. She became a fundraiser for an organization that protects high-end women and children from abuse, then resigned and took up painting when the lesbian running the organization assaulted her in the restroom.

The liberal reader may wonder why I maintain a friendship with Regina. The truth of the matter is that Regina is really not evil. She is a fake racist, a walking self-contradiction, and she does not know it. She is actually horrified by the abuse of animals including human animals, and her self-defensive, icy attitude melts into sympathetic tears at the sight of a creature in pain.

My own moral fault is that I tend to like all sorts of people high and low. Yet I certainly would not like them if they were committing crimes against humanity such as sending unwanted people to the ovens, or if they were ripping kids from the arms of their parents and putting them into cages, as the president has sadistically done on behalf of his basest base simply to acquire more narcissistic supplies for his unreality show.

What troubles me most about President Trump, who is Regina’s champion merely because he is a Republican president, and that despite having traits that she despises in other men, is that he fathers the lies told by his sycophants, who regularly show the fig to the public.

Americans have become so practical that they think they can separate personal morals from public politics. As long as they get what they want, they do not care about the personal immorality of the politician. Let him lie and cheat at will, and never mind how mean he may be, as long as he serves their interest. But he who lies and cheats will lie to them and cheat them in one way or another.

I myself have a few conservative friends who support Donald Trump because they believe he serves their interest in conserving their status at the apex of the social pyramid, which they believe is their natural and divine right. They profess that Logos or Reason should preside over disagreements, yet they do not want to reason with friends who disagree with the character of their man in the White House in order to persuade them that immoral and unethical means have good ends.

Their excuse is that this man is just like everyone else. Therefore he is a representative man, as good and evil as any other. They end disagreeable friendships instead of persuading their friends that they are right. Why? Because they know they are wrong.

The satanic principle presides in the Oval Office at present. No one’s interest is secure when the father of lies is at the head of government.

Je Suis Moi, as the reader may know, had been an Existentialist before he perused Pence’s classic, Donald The Great, About Whom Nothing Greater Can Be Thought, which led to his free subscription to the How to Make Yourself Great Again Channel, and, ultimately, to his magic mushroom conversion to Egotism.

He had been a very depressed existentialist at that. He found no joy in the concept that life was meaningless so one should be happy with a menial job providing there was sufficient budget after rent and enough time off work to get a suntan, drink tequila, consort with prostitutes, and smoke hashish. What depressed him all along was the absurd notion essential to existentialism, that existence was before Being because all the misconceptions of Being got humans in trouble, even caused wars.

He intuited that he was not a speck of dirt, a tomato living in the now, or a naked ape with some kind of being pasted on as an afterthought. There is certainly a more essential being, some Being that comes before existence, as we should all know by now, but he did not know who he originally was. If he did, he would have gone home again.

“Existence in itself does not even exist,” he thought during one of his drunken mental masturbations. “I am someone at least, someone that actually is, that is what comes first, not existence.”

He mentioned his doubts to a fellow kitchen worker, who handed him a dog-eared copy of Donald The Great.

“Don’t be stupid, stupid, read this,” said the short order cook, “everyone else has, and become someone, an independent contractor like the rest of us.”

Sure enough, Donald The Great not only confirmed that he was someone, but that he was whatever he thought he was, and that was always something very, very great, indeed, because he was once very great and could be even greater again, thus he was born again.

It would not be long before he encountered Maya, his alter ego, a dissident from French Welandia, and changed his name to Je Suis Moi. He signed on to the independent contractor program at work, convinced, despite Maya’s advice, that he would be so great again that he would never need social benefits.

He would be promoted to server two years later. He was laid off and found himself without unemployment benefits. The benefits would have been minimal anyway, and not because of his low pay: no more than a thousand workers in Melandia, most of them Welandians with temporary permits to work jobs Melandians did not want, were contributing into the fund.

Maya, once a jurist in France, now reduced to selling drawings of Je Suis Moi on the sidewalks, threatened to leave him unless he got another job. Wherefore he contracted for doorman work at Trump Island, known as “Puerto Rico” before Donald the Great purchased it with a Russian loan after forcing it into bankruptcy liquidation.

His egotistical expectations exceeded his station there and it was not long before the both of them were deported with only each other and the clothes on their backs. They managed to escape from the ship bound for Welandia and made their way to Chania, capital of Independent Crete, where Je Suis Moi took a dishwasher job, immersed himself in Greek myths and imagined himself not only to be the famous Cretan necromancer, Epimenides, but the personification of Zeus from time to time.

Such was the tremendous influence of the book Donald The Great that it literally saved Je Suis Moi’s life, for he had decided that a merely existential life was not worth living, and he would have ended his if Pence’s book had not been thrust into his hands on that fateful day in the kitchen.